Writing of the failed US-sponsored coup attempt in Venezuela on April 30, Uri Friedman of The Atlantic (5/1/19) referred to the Venezuelan branch of the coup as Juan “Guaidó’s pro-democracy movement.” The logical contradiction could scarcely be more pronounced: A wave of Friedman’s wand transforms a political force seeking the military overthrow of Venezuela’s elected government into a “pro-democracy movement.”
The Venezuelan government’s current mandate comes from winning an election on May 20, 2018 that was observed by more than 150 members of the International Electoral Accompaniment Mission. In a joint report, the observers said of the agency that organizes the country’s electoral process, “The technical and professional trustworthiness and independence of the National Electoral Council of Venezuela are uncontestable.” The Council of Electoral Experts of Latin America, one of the groups that participated in the observer mission, reported that the “results communicated by the National Electoral Council reflect the will of the voters who decided to participate in the electoral process.”
The Wall Street Journal (5/1/19) performed the same trick, writing that “Venezuela’s democratic leaders launched a revolt against Cuban-backed dictator Nicolas Maduro.” In the Journal’s universe, Maduro is a “dictator” despite heading a country with a legislative branch controlled by the opposition, where in October 2017 the opposition won five governorships, and which has thus far declined to arrest a politician agitating for a military putsch in open collaboration with hostile foreign powers, to the extent of entertaining the possibility of supporting a US invasion and supporting US-led sanctions that are devastating the country’s economy.
Imagine what the US would do with, say, someone acting in concert with a similarly energetic Iranian or Chinese effort to oust the US government. It’s not an exact analogy, since Iran and China have no history of ruthlessly dominating the region in which the US is located, but the point should be clear.
For the Journal, “Venezuela’s democratic leaders” are those who sat out the country’s election, claimed it was unfair and then declined to file an appeal with the country’s National Electoral Council (CNE). One is hard-pressed to imagine a more soundly democratic practice than Guaidó not running for president and then declaring himself president even as 80 percent of Venezuelans had never heard of him at the time. According to historian Tony Wood (London Review of Books, 2/21/19):
Maduro won 68 per cent of the vote, on a turnout of 46 percent—more or less par for the democratic course in the US, but low by Venezuelan standards.
Guaidó’s claim to power rests on the idea that, since this vote was invalid, not only is Maduro not the legitimate president but, according to a Transition Law the opposition released on 8 January, there is no president. Constitutionally, this is shaky ground. Article 233 of the 1999 Venezuelan constitution specifies the circumstances under which a president can be replaced: death, resignation, removal by the supreme court, physical or mental incapacity, abandonment of post. The National Assembly has a supervisory role to play in each of these scenarios, but nowhere does the constitution say that the legislature can claim executive power for itself. This is why the opposition instead cites Article 333, a provision that exhorts citizens to help re-establish constitutional order in the event that it is derogated by an act of force. In other words, the opposition is claiming the constitution no longer applies but that in the resulting “state of exception” the National Assembly is empowered to bring it into effect once more, as soon as Maduro—whom it calls a “usurper”—is removed. Another significant detail: Article 233 requires new elections within 30 days, but the opposition’s Transition Law makes no such specific commitment.
It’s hard to conceive of a case for considering such actions “democratic,” yet this is the record of those whom the Journal calls “Venezuela’s democratic leaders.”
In February, the Washington Post (2/26/19) ran an article headlined “How Venezuela’s Pro-Democracy Movement Has Learned From Past Mistakes.” It says that
since January 5, when Juan Guaidó was sworn in as [the National Assembly’s] president, he and its members have used the “Cabildo Abierto” (or open town meetings) to engage communities, communicating a message of inclusion for this new stage of the pro-democracy movement….
Many in the pro-democracy movement are successfully arguing that nonviolent discipline is a key to success. Guaidó, along with other political leaders and civil society organizations, has repeatedly called for the struggle to be assertive but peaceful.
This too mischaracterizes Guaidó as being part of a “pro-democracy movement.” The description is ill-fitting, considering that Guaidó’s movement has rejected the Venezuelan government’s proposal for dialogue, as well as Mexico and the Vatican’s offers to mediate talks, in favor of siding with the global empire that has unleashed widespread violence and poverty in the region and that, according to a study by two US economists, killed an estimated more than 40,000 Venezuelans between 2017–18 in the course of preventing the country’s economic recovery.
Perhaps even more absurd is when international attacks on Venezuela are cast as exercises in democracy. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times (2/6/19) described one of the countries involved in the aggression, Canada, as “a moral leader” of something called “the free world.” Evidently it wasn’t enough for Kristof to write the same article two years earlier, almost to the day (2/4/17), under the headline “Canada, Leading the Free World.” In the more recent piece, Kristof’s case rests not only on such matters of world historic importance as Canada’s “traffic safety laws,” but also on Venezuela:
Trump gets headlines with his periodic threats to invade Venezuela to topple President Nicolás Maduro, but Canada has been quietly working since 2017 to help organize the Lima Group of 14 nations pushing for democracy in Venezuela. When Canada recognized the opposition leader Juan Guaidó as interim president, he won credibility because nobody sees Ottawa as an imperialist conspirator.
Lost on Kristof was that that Canada’s “moral leader[ship]” and status as a member of whatever “the free world” is was exposed as smoke and mirrors not even a month earlier, when Canadian police armed with military-level assault gear invaded Unist’ot’en, an indigenous territory whose people never ceded control of their land to Canada in any treaty, and arrested 14 people who had set up a checkpoint to defend the land from construction of a natural gas pipeline. Far from “nobody see[ing] Ottawa as an imperialist conspirator,” many scholars have shown that Canada is an imperialist power in its own right, notably as an oppressive and exploitative force in countries in the same region as Venezuela, such as Honduras and Haiti.
Kristof, however, takes for granted that the Lima Group is committed to democracy in Venezuela, even though its members have subverted democracy in other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. Also in the Lima Group is Colombia, which, according to NACLA (3/7/19),
has the highest number of recorded assassinations of human rights defenders in the world. In the first 15 days of January 2019 alone, nine social leaders were murdered.
Honduras is a member too, and after its sham elections in November 2017, the Honduran government “used excessive force to suppress the wave of demonstrations that followed” (Amnesty International, 6/13/18), detaining hundreds of people and denying the right of due process in several cases. Lima Group countries violate democratic principles at home, but Kristof assures us that they are “pushing for democracy in Venezuela.”
More to the point is the cognitive dissonance in describing an unelected organ of outside powers like the Lima Group, who are in no way accountable to Venezuelans, as “pushing for democracy in Venezuela.” In Kristof’s worldview, a non-democratic body forcing out Venezuela’s elected government in violation of international law will magically have a democratic outcome.
Maybe the most ridiculous article on this subject came from TownHall.com editor Katie Pavlich, writing in The Hill (4/30/19), who asserted that Maduro, who
has been able to maintain power throughout years of fraudulent “elections” in the country, is backed by Russia, China, Iran and personally protected by Cuban gangs. Guaidó is backed by US allies Brazil, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Israel, Canada and others. For the sake of democracy alone, the choice here is obvious.
The author went on to write:
The United States and much of the pro-democracy global community have backed Guaidó, but serious enemies looking to gain a stronger foothold in the hemisphere aren’t backing down from Maduro. What happens now will be definitive and will determine a free or tyrannical future for the country.
One can infer that the countries who are resisting the nonexistent “Cuban gangs” and backing Guaidó enumerated in the first paragraph of this middle-school essay are the ones that Pavlich considers “the pro-democracy global community”—a list that includes Brazil, another Lima Group freedom fighter, which is governed by a fascist who was only elected because the country’s most popular leader was a political prisoner; Israel, which governs nearly 5 million Palestinians who have no right to vote on who rules them or how; the colonial Canadian state that oppresses indigenous peoples as brutally as the US does African-Americans; and the US itself, which imprisons people at a higher rate than any other country, and is less a democracy than an oligarchy.
At every turn, Guaidó and his backers have taken steps that have nothing to do with democracy, and everything to do with what Oscar Guardiola-Rivera (Independent, 5/1/19), who teaches human rights and philosophy at the University of London, aptly labeled “a white supremacist foreign intervention.” That corporate media manage to portray this as a “pro-democracy movement” is both a tragedy and a farce.
Featured image: Depiction of Juan Guaidó in The Atlantic (5/1/19). (photo: Fernando Llano/AP)
Updated: 5/11/19
Douglas Jack
Wow Gregory Shupak, Excellent research & composition of facts!
As a 66 year old Canadian I am aware that Canada’s foreign export economy is tied with the US. 45% of Canadian exports are arms, munitions, security & war-related, the same as USA’s 45% war-exports. However Canada leads the USA because we are the world’s #1 mining & forestry exploiter-extractors domestically & internationally. Canada has the largest raw-material mineral & forestry extraction corporations, hence our active violent aggression in Venezuela, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chile etc etc. Far beyond the USA, Canadians per capita are the 2nd largest war economy. Canada is only superseded by Israel who make a killing on 65% of their arms & war-economy exports as the world’s leading conduits of European & North-American arms. Like the USA, Trudeau & Sheer’s war-economy oligarch masters, secretly finance the election of Canadian Members of Parliament, Members of Provincial Assemblies & much of our Municipal Assemblies. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/relational-economy/7-canada-1-war-mongeror
This affront to real ‘democracy’ (Greek ‘power-of-the-people’) is as old as oligarch-run Canada’s 400 year old invasion & genocide of the originally democratic 1st Nations, who successfully & abundantly governed Turtle-Island (North-America) as an integrated Economic-Democracy of some 35 confederacies & some 200 nations. Europeans came over as oligarch ship-transported export of economic-ecological failure to the Americas, Africa, Asia & Australia. In our submission to oligarch direction, we imposed our violent failure upon 1st Nations here & ‘indigenous’ (Latin ‘self-generating’) peoples worldwide. Canada as a puppet of the Finance-Media-Religion-Education-Military-Industrial-Legislative-Judicial-Complex is more guilty per capita than Americans for the destabilization & invasion war-deaths of 1/2 billion people over the past 500 years. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/relational-economy/8-economic-democracy
RG
Unfortunately sir, you missed the point of the fraudulent 2018 elections. It was not the numerical result that was erroneous, rather it was the process itself that was fraudulent. Note that the top two political opponents were prevented from running for office: Leopoldo Lopez was jailed on bogus charges and Henrique Capriles was barred from running. For this reason, a majority of the country chose not to vote, and as a consequence it appears that Maduro won. Also, no country is free of corruption (the US and Lima Group members included), but does it not raise some flags if your primary support comes from Russia, China, and Cuba?
Eric
1. Unfortunately, RG, you missed the point that Leopoldo Lopez was barred from running because of his role in the murderous guarimba protests in 2017. If Bernie Sanders had urged his supporters to blockade roads, attack public buildings, burn warehouses of food and kill Trump supporters — all of which Lopez’s legions did — would Bernie now be running for election?
2. The Venezuelan government’s primary support comes from the Venezuelan people, secondarily from the army, and only after that from the majority of countries that lack 800 military bases around the world or a 200-year history of subverting democracy in other countries. This is not evident from mainstream media coverage, but is known to many from other sources.
Eddie S
Exactly right Eric. Additionally, regarding RG’s comment on Venezuela’s primary support supposedly coming from China, Russia, and Cuba, how would that be a problem even IF it were true?
First of all, the US is very commercially involved with China —- just check the shelves of any store, big-box or local hardware, or online venues, and the vast majority of items are made in China (unless the corporation found an even more-desperate, exploitable labor-source elsewhere). China is involved in commercial ventures in Africa as well. Europe imports natural gas from Russia. So why would another country working with any of those countries be some sort of negative?
Secondly, with US sanctions cowing/coercing ‘western’ nations from trading with Venezuela, where else CAN Venezuela go?
Thirdly (and admittedly parenthetically), what do those three(3) countries have in common? Yup, all three have been subject to US troop invasion — China back in the Opium Wars, Russia during the beginning of the Russian Revolution, and of course Cuba during the Bay of Pigs as well as previous occupation by the US. How many times have those countries invaded the US soil? Zero(0) would be a good round number answer (interestingly enough, our ‘special relationship’ buddy England was the first to do that and they burned-down our capitol bldg in DC, circa 1812,followed by our current ally Japan, and their attack on Pearl Harbor).
Ted Shohfi
This article is the clearest and most truthful explanation of the current situation in Venezuela that I have seen. It should be read by everyone on both sides of the issue. Thank you for this.
Eddie S
Excellent summary of the situation in Venezuela. As any of us US citizens who have made even a moderate inquiry into the US history of interventions can attest-to, the US government doesn’t go around the world, to other continents, or even to most states in the US to ‘protect democracy’, with the Iraq War-Crime being an indisputable example of the real geopolitical motives at play.
patrick o'neill
This is well-presented political commentary that re-tells the never-ending horror story of US imperialism, and how US “interests” in the region trump our respect for life and truth. It is tragic that so few US citizens possess intellectual curiosity on even a basic level … so the plundering goes on and on, unchecked and without accountability. Jesus Weeps! Patrick O’Neill Garner, NC
THANK YOU FAIR
Eric
Canada’s ‘moral leadership’ amounts to acting as Uncle Sam’s lapdog. (At least Tony Poodle Blair stood on his hind legs.) Canada actively plotted with France and the U.S. to overthrow democracy in Haiti in 2003-2004, supported the 2009 military coup in Honduras with acquiescence (and backed subsequent coup-based governments) and contentedly watches the death squads murder democrats in Colombia, and doesn’t mind a neo-fascist running Brazil.
In fact, last January, ‘Global Affairs’ minister Chrystia Freeland stood by Brazil’s Bolsonaro and Colombia’s Duque to call for the overthrow of the elected government of Venezuela. Equally macabre, she later took time out from orchestrating support for a Venezuelan coup to warn Canadians that ‘foreign actors’ would try to influence Canadian elections. She has no sense of shame — or irony.
Helen
When the US sponsored the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically-elected government in 2014 they called that a “pro-democracy” movement too.
Carlos
What a steaming pile of dung!
1. You quote Venezuelan (Chavista) government sources (venezuelanalysis.com) that claim that a Venezuelan government election observing body (CEELA) confirmed the last presidential elections in Venezuela to be fair and democratic…
https://theglobalamericans.org/2017/10/council-electoral-specialists-latin-america-ceela/
https://www.elnuevodiario.com.ni/politica/19160-ceela-fue-creado-chavez/
2. Let us remember the Smartmatic scandal in 2017:
Smartmatic is (was) the Venezuelan company that created and ran the electronic voting system in Venezuela that the Carter Institute called one of the best systems in the world. That company ended its relationship with the Venezuelan government because they detected fraud in their system, manipulation of the voter rolls and results by the government.
Who runs the electoral system in Venezuela now? The CNE, stacked with PSUV members.
When the ruling party controls the voting rolls, reprograms the machines, controls the network connecting these machines, and controls the political mechanism to dispute voting irregularities. Do you expect the election to be fair and true? No, nobody can guarantee the election results. It also doesn’t matter how many observers happen to be at the polling stations if machines have been programmed to report one extra vote for the ruling party out of every 99.
3. In 2018, the CNE controlled by the ruling party claimed a 46% attendance, but, the opposition and independent reports put the attendance level at ~20%. News casts of the day showed empty polling booths throughout the day, even in districts with strong Chavista support where long lines formed in previous years.
4. Maduro is nowhere near as popular as Chavez ever was, yet, the CNE-reported 2018 election results gave Maduro more votes than Chavez. Do you think that if Maduro were running against Chavez that Maduro would win? Not in a billion years… this is evidence that Maduro’s votes were inflated.
5. The regime has often urged chavistas to wear the party colors when going to the polls. Why? So that know to leave you alone. Anyone not wearing the party colors is basically a target.
6. Talk about the Carnet de la Patria. It is an ID, separate from the normal National ID, that is used to distribute benefits, social services and track the purchases of price-controlled product as well as gasoline in some regions; it can also be used to track people’s voting behavior and to force individuals to attend government rallies. Party members are “urged” to have one of these, poor people that need cheap food have to have these, government employees, and anyone that uses social services.
An individual registered in this system could potentially lose their benefits/services or be unable to purchase price-controlled food stuff if they vote the wrong way or fail to show up at a pro-Maduro rally (they check attendance). Isn’t this the definition of coercion? Is this what YOU call democracy?
7. When the PSUV controlled the National Assembly, every time that Chavez and Maduro requested special powers to decree, these powers were granted and they dictated. When opposition parties won the majority in the National Assembly, Maduro called for a referendum to set up a Constituyente with the purpose to re-draft the constitution, the referendum “passed” (thanks to the party controlled CNE) and the National Assembly Constituyente was established. It now claims the same legislative powers as the National Assembly. The party-controlled constituyente (ANC) exists to rubber stamp every request made by Maduro.
Do you think that such a single party system is “democratic”? North Korea has a similar system and they even have “Democratic” in the name, but, is it truly a democracy?
In conclusion:
Your article is hot pile of it that would only make sense to individuals ignorant of Venezuela, people that want to believe in the United (Evil Empire) States of America, and people who (for some reason) want to push a pro-Maduro agenda.
Olenka Folda
This is an excellent commentary, perhaps the best I’ve read on the attempted coup in Venezuela and how the “respected” media have spun it. The quotes tell it all, perfect examples of the fake news bombarding the public, and
Mr. Shupak clearly and decisively places the tragic turmoil engulfing the Venezuelan people in a historical context.
Bernardo J Rodriguez
How can you write about Venezuela (my country) without doing some homework, or at the very least, visit the country for a week? Do you know under which conditions elections happen in Venezuela? Do you know that Government money is use to finance elections, that the population is threatened if they don’t vote for Maduro, that the electoral committee is a puppet of Maduro, that opposition candidates are in jail or forbidden to run for office? Do you know that the supreme Court abolish the powers of the Congress? Do you know how many people are in jail? You should be embarrassed to talk about what you don’t know. Go to Venezuela and see for yourself before writing such an ignorant article from the comfort of your desk in Canada. You might visit my country and help kids pick food from the garbage or bring dollars to pay corrupt government officials for antibiotics so that hospitals can save lives.
Robert
150 international observers declared the election free and fair. The fact that the opposition refused to participate and, as stated in the article FAILED TO APPEAL THE RESULT makes your comment laughably absurd. Leopoldo Lopez, currently cowering in the Spanish embassy- again as stated in the article- was banned from participating because he fomented murder and mayhem, nothing “trumped up”about it. Btw, of our English usage is uncommonly good, are you sure you are Venezuelan?
KC
The comfort of his desk in Canada? Like the comfort of your desk in Europe or North America?
LOL – you hypocrite 1%-er VZ expats – have probably not even been to Venezuela since Chavez.
Larry Wilt
Why does Fair continue to focus on the voting itself in Venezuela rather than Maduro’s prevention of leading candidates from running and banning some parties from running under their own names? Could you please say something about what Maduro did BEFORE the vote to make the election rigged?
Peter Dahu
I notice everytime there is an article that isn’t anti-Maduro, a host of anti-Chavistas come rushing to criticize. Makes me believe anti-Chavistas have a troll army similar to Pro-Israel trolls.